Submissions

Author Guidelines

Proposals for contributions must be sent through the online procedure available on the journal website, exclusively during the period indicated in the Call for contributions (see the section Announcements).

Editorial guidelines for L’Uomo Nero

The average length of articles should be between 20 and 25 typewritten pages (about 40-50,000 characters, including spaces and notes) for the Monographic and Fuoritema (Author’s Choice) sections and between 10 and 12 typewritten pages (about 20-24,000 characters, including spaces and notes) for the Rares, Rediscovered, Notices section.  Materials published as appendices to the article (transcriptions of sources, lists of works etc.) may be excluded from the total characters specified above. 

The article’s length should in any event be in proportion to its contents.

Articles in the Monographic and Fuoritema (Author’s Choice) sections normally contain between 12 and 18 illustrations, while contributions to the Rares, Rediscovered, Notices section have between 5 and 10 illustrations. Images will be published colour and in black and white, according to the originals.

Articles should be written in Italian, English or French.

Quotations in the other main European languages (German and Spanish) may be left in the original language in the text, with a note giving the translation in the article’s main language.

All articles must be submitted in Word .doc (or .docx) format.

The main text must be in Times or Times New Roman font, 11-point, justified, single spacing.

Brief quotations (maximum 2 lines) may be placed between inverted commas (“ ”) in the main body of the article; longer quotations must be set between inverted commas (“ ”) in the same font as the main text, not in italics or bold, 11-point, left-aligned, without indentation.

Notes must be placed at the end of the text, sequentially numbered with Arabic numbers, in the same font as the main body, 9-point, left-aligned.

Any transcriptions of documents for publication in the appendix must be submitted in the same font size as the body of the text, while lists of works or sources should be in the font size of the notes. Any tables or graphs must be agreed with the editor, after the article has been definitively approved for publication.

Captions for illustrations must be sequentially numbered with Arabic numbers (Fig. 1, Fig. 2 etc.) and must follow this syntax: 

Fig. 1…, First name and Surname of author, Title of work, date, collocation, source of illustration, if any and photographic credits; they must have the same font as the main text, 9-point, left-aligned.

Illustrations must be submitted together with the article, in separate, high quality .jpg files, sequentially numbered with Arabic numerals. Dimensions requested are 300 dpi, base 15 cm. In the event of problems, the editors may agree to accept images with slightly lower resolution. 

Fig. 1 will be used as full-page image at the beginning of the article.

Any other doubts may be resolved by first consulting the most recent issue of the journal.

The editors are available for further clarification only after an article has been accepted for publication (as indicated in the Call for Papers).

Abbreviations

List of most common abbreviations

article/s art. / artt.

chapter/s cap. / capp.

cited cit. / citt.

see cfr.

etcetera ecc. (never preceded by a comma)

edition ed.

cited edition ed.cit.

bundle/s fasc.

figure/s fig. / figg.

Idem Id.

illustration/s ill.

manuscript/s ms. / mss.

author’s note [n.d.a.]

editor’s note [n.d.r.]

translator’s note [n.d.t.]

not numbered n.n.

number/s n. /nn.

new series n.s.

cited work op. cit.

page/s p. / pp.

paragraph/s par. / parr.

recto, verso r. / v.

following sg. / sgg. (not preceded by e)

undated s.d.

place unknown s.l.

section/s sez. / sezz.

table/s tab. / tabb.

plate/s tav. / tavv.

Italian translation trad. it.

vedi always in full

verse/s v. / vv.

volume/s vol. / voll.

Accents:

In Italian, tonic accents should be avoided in general, except in cases of real ambiguity (princìpi, dèi, sètte).

Words in Spanish only take the acute accent (Almodóvar, García Lorca).

In Italian, a, i, o and u at the end of a word take the grave accent; e at the end of a word always take the acute accent except in the following cases: è, cioè, tè, caffè, ahimè, Mosè, Noè… and in words of French origin (lacchè, bignè…).

Do not use an apostrophe for upper case accented vowels: È never E’

Bibliography cited in notes

Information should be given in this order:

• author: first name and surname in u/l case roman, followed by a comma. If there are more than three authors, never use “AA.VV.” or “First name et al.”, but only indicate the title of the text.
• title: always u/l case italics, followed by a comma. It is advisable to always endeavour to use the original title of a work, followed by its translation.
• place u/l roman, followed by a comma,
• publisher: u/l roman, followed by a comma.
• date: u/l roman

In Italian, cities outside of Italy must be cited using the Italian version of their name, if it exists (Londra, Mosca etc.).

When place and date of publishing are unknown, use s.l. and s.d. respectively.

Some examples:

Tommaso Landolfi, A caso, Milano, Rizzoli, 1975.

Roland Barthes, L’empire des signes, Ginevra, Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1975, (trad. it. L’impero dei segni, Torino, Einaudi, 1984).

Diego Rivera, Portrait of America. With an Explanatory Text by Bertram D. Wolfe, Londra, George Allen & Unwin, 1935.

All words in titles in English have capital letters excepting prepositions and articles.

For exhibition catalogues:

title  italics, in round brackets the city, place and dates of exhibition, without brackets the first name and surname of editor / curator preceded by ed. or cur. (in Italian: a c. di), place of publishing, publisher, year, portion of text.

Da Modigliani a Fontana. Disegno italiano del XX secolo nelle Civiche Raccolte d’Arte di Milano, (Milano, Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea, 3 ottobre-8 dicembre 1991), a c. di Mercedes Garberi, Milano, Mazzotta, 1991, pp. 45-52.

For articles published in catalogues or anthologies:

Author, title, in title of catalogue etc.

Giovanna Ginex, Attilio Pusterla, in Immagini di vita proletaria. Attilio Pusterla e le cucine economiche, (Milano, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, 2 aprile-2 giugno 1980), a c. di Antonello Negri, Milano, Silvana Editoriale, 1980, pp. 35-38.

Elena Pontiggia, La linea e l’eternità. Poetiche del disegno tra metafisica e Novecento, in Da Modigliani a Fontana. Disegno italiano del XX secolo nelle Civiche Raccolte d’Arte di Milano, (Milano, Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea, 3 ottobre-8 dicembre 1991), a c. di Mercedes Garberi, Milano, Mazzotta, 1991, pp. 45-52.

For articles published in journals:

Author and title as above, name of journal in inverted commas, all upper case except for articles and prepositions, year in Roman numerals and number in round brackets, year if annual, month and year if monthly/bi-monthly, complete date if weekly or daily, portion of text cited.

Renato Birolli, Nostalgia di Verona, “Vita Veronese”, IV (12), 1951, p. 12.

For citations of bibliographical excerpts from dictionaries, encyclopaedias and the like, the title of the work comes after the author and the entry.

87. Bertoldi, ad vocem Poggio Bracciolini, in Enciclopedia della letteratura internazionale, vol. XXV, Torino, Utet, 1973, pp. 85-87.

For repetition of bibliographical data:

if the author of two texts cited consecutively is the same: Id. / Ead.;

if citing in two consecutive notes two different pages of the same text: Ivi, pp. x-y;

if citing in two consecutive notes the same page of the same text Ibidem;

if citing a work already cited in another part of the text:

First name Surname, op. cit.,  if this is the only work by that author cited;

First name Surname, Abbreviated Title, cit., portion of text.

Citations

• Citations in the text should be between smart (curvy) double quotation marks.

“Call for me this evening”.

• A citation within a citation goes into single smart quotation marks.

“He said: ‘Call for me this evening’”.

• When a citation references a note, the note’s number must always come after closed quotation marks, in Arabic numerals, in superscript and without brackets.
  
  

Euphonic consonants

These are only used, in Italian, between the same vowels (ad Ancona, ed ecco), not between different vowels (never ed io, od anche).

Exception: ad esempio, except in phrases such as  “fu citato a esempio”.

Italics

Italics are used for:

titles of books, films, newspaper or journal articles, TV programmes, recordings, exhibitions;

• foreign, Latin or dialect words not in common use;

Bear in mind that in Italian if a foreign word is in roman type, it cannot form the plural as in its original language, being considered adopted into Italian: “Giovanni mi ha inviato tre e-mail”. (Never “e-mails”).

Capitals

Capital letters are used for:

• periods or events of great importance: the Thirties, the Risorgimento, the French Revolution, the First World War;
• geographic terms if they refer to a region: North America (but to the north of Milan); the crisis in the Middle East (but to the east of Turin);
• place names: multi-word place names should use a lower-case first letter for the common noun, while the proper noun has a capital letter: mar Caspio, mare Tirreno, monte Bianco, lago Maggiore, baia dei Porci, golfo di Napoli etcetera;
• appellations and nicknames: Lorenzo the Magnificent, Richard the Lionheart;
• proper names of bodies, institutions, organisations: Famiglia Artistica, Aziende Lombarde di Edilizia Residenziale, Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea;

for the better-known and more common acronyms use the format u/l case (rather than capitals with full stops): Cee, Usa, Urss, Onu, Aids etcetera;

All the words in titles of journals and newspapers have a capital letter except for articles and prepositions: “Il Corriere della Sera”

Lower case

Lower case first letters are used for: nationalities, aristocratic, ecclesiastical and academic titles, public offices, military ranks and units, streets, squares, avenues, gates; artistic, political and cultural movements etcetera.

Notes

The progressive number of the note always precedes all punctuation, excluding inverted commas.

Titles and authors

For titles cited in texts see the following examples:

not L’autore della Noia.

but L’autore di (or de) La Noia.

not Nei Promessi sposi.

but Ne I promessi sposi

Inverted commas

When closing inverted commas coincides with the end of the sentence, the full stop will be:

• inside the commas if the sentence is entirely between inverted commas (including the full stop) or of direct speech.

“Il capitale non ha come fine”, ci ricorda Marx, “la soddisfazione dei bisogni, ma la produzione del profitto.”

• outside the commas if the sentence only contains some words in inverted commas, or in the case of reported or indirect speech.

Il capitalismo genera “le condizioni materiali e le forme sociali necessarie per una ricostruzione economica della società”.